New to Being Dry, the South Struggles to Adapt

Val Perry of the Lake Lanier Association walking from his dock last week. The governor of Georgia wants the Army Corps of Engineers to reduce the amount of water it releases from the lake.Credit
Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

ATLANTA, Oct. 22 — For more than five months, the lake that provides drinking water to almost five million people here has been draining away in a withering drought. Sandy beaches have expanded into flats of orange mud. Tree stumps not seen in half a century have resurfaced. Scientists have warned of impending disaster.

And life, for the most part, has gone on just as before.

The response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion. All summer, more than a year after the drought began, fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow.

By September, with the lake forecast to dip into the dregs of its storage capacity in less than four months, the state imposed a ban on outdoor water use.

Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia declared October “Take a Shorter Shower Month.” And Saturday, Mr. Perdue declared a state of emergency for more than half the state and asked for federal assistance, though the state has not yet restricted indoor water use or cut back on major commercial and industrial users, a step that could cause a significant loss of jobs.

These last-minute measures belie a history of inaction in Georgia and across the South when it comes to managing and conserving water, even in the face of rapid growth. Between 1990 and 2000, water use in Georgia increased 30 percent. But the state has not yet come up with an estimate of how much water is available during periods of normal rainfall, much less a plan to handle the worst-case event — dry faucets.

“We have made it clear to the planners and executive management of this state for years that we may very well be on the verge of a systemwide emergency,” said Mark Crisp, a water expert in the Atlanta office of the engineering firm C. H. Guernsey.

But a sense of urgency has been slow to take hold. Last year, a bill died in the Georgia Legislature that would have required that low-flow water devices be installed in older houses before they are resold. Most golf courses are classified as “agricultural.” Water permits are still approved first come first served.

And Georgia is not at the back of the pack. Alabama, where severe drought is even more widespread, is even further behind in its planning.

A realistic statewide plan, experts say, would tell developers that they could not build if no water was available, and might have restricted some of the enormous growth in the Atlanta area over the last decade. Already, officials have little notion how to provide for a projected doubling of demand over the next 30 years. The ideas that have been floated, including piping in water from Tennessee or desalinating ocean water, would require hundreds of billions of dollars and painful decision making the state has been reluctant to undertake.

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Low levels this month at Lake Lanier, which supplies water to Atlanta. The Southeast has been slow to respond to its drought.Credit
John Bazemore/Associated Press

“It’s been develop first and ask questions later,” said Gil Rogers, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Instead, Georgia has engaged in interminable squabbles with neighboring states over dam releases and flow rates. The latest effort at mediation with Alabama fell apart just last month. And Georgia officials insist that Atlanta would have plenty of water were it not for the Army Corps of Engineers, which they say has released more water from its main source of water, Lake Lanier, than is necessary to protect three endangered species downstream. Last week, Mr. Perdue filed for an injunction against the corps to stop the release of water. (Downstream, Alabama officials responded in protest, saying they need the releases.)

“We are not here because we consumed our way into this drought, as some would suggest,” said Carol Couch, Mr. Perdue’s director of environmental protection.

Those making that argument against Georgia include many people in Florida, the only state in the region to have adopted a water plan and home to the downstream end of the basin that includes Lake Lanier. An editorial Friday in the St. Petersburg Times said that the blame lay not with the corps but with “a record drought, unrestrained population growth and poor water-conservation habits.”

Bruce A. Karas, vice president of sustainability for Coca-Cola, said no one from the City of Atlanta or its water planning district had approached company officials to ask them to conserve water. Mr. Karas said the company had worked to reduce consumption on its own since 2004.

“We’re very concerned,” Mr. Karas said. “Water is our main ingredient. As a company, we look at areas where we expect water abundance and water scarcity, and we know water is scarce in the Southwest. It’s very surprising to us that the Southeast is in a water shortage.”

Mary Kay Woodworth, executive director of the Metro Atlanta Landscape and Turf Association, said almost 14,000 workers in landscaping and other businesses that depend on planting and watering had lost their jobs.

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“This is a precious natural resource, and it has not been managed well,” Ms. Woodworth said. “That’s one of the reasons we’re in this situation today. The infrastructure was not in place for the development.”

In 2001, the state did establish the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District for 16 counties and dozens of jurisdictions in the Atlanta area. The district has focused on conservation pricing, under which the price of water rises with consumption, and on incentives for replacing inefficient plumbing and monitoring for leaks, a major cause of water loss.

Some environmentalists criticize the district, saying its requirements are weak and its progress unmeasured. The district’s projections, they say, are based on an outdated estimate of water availability, provided by the state, that does not take into account climate change. Pat Stevens, chief environmental planner for the Atlanta Regional Committee, which provides employees to the water district, said the plan was being revised and the requirements would tighten.

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“You can’t just do this overnight,” Ms. Stevens said. “Otherwise, you will close businesses.”

“We will out-conservation California,” she added. “But, you know, it takes time.”

In January, the Legislature will consider a proposal to expand the planning process statewide.

State officials defend their response, saying the drought got very bad very quickly.

And Georgia is not the only state in trouble. The drought has afflicted most of the Southeast, a region that is accustomed to abundant water and that tends to view mandatory restrictions as government meddling. Lake Lanier is part of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River system, which forms much of the border between Georgia and Alabama and then spills into Florida. There, the river provides a habitat for two types of mussel and a sturgeon that are endangered.

The temptation to blame the corps is strong. Because of years of litigation, the corps operates the dams on the river system under an interim policy driven largely by the need to protect the endangered species of fish and shellfish downstream. Critics say the policy’s minimum-flow requirement does not take into account severe dry spells and is not supported by science. Mr. Perdue has said that the flow is twice what nature would provide under similar circumstances.

Two weekends ago, the corps added to the pain in North Georgia by increasing the flow out of Lake Lanier even as it was shrinking. The lake is the only one in the basin that still has water in what is considered the storage pool, usually the top 60 percent of capacity. (Using the remaining water, called “dead storage,” could require different intake mechanisms and more treatment.)

In response to Mr. Perdue’s complaints, the corps has agreed to consult the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, which protects endangered species, about modifying flow requirements in the Apalachicola River.

With a public anxious over the possibility of running out of water, the corps has not been the only entity to shoulder blame.

On Oct. 1, Stone Mountain Park began to make snow for a winter mountain, hoping to attract children who had not seen the real thing. The mountain was planned during the very wet summer of 2005, and the state and local governments were duly informed, said Christine Parker, a spokeswoman for the park.

The state announced a Level 4 drought response on a Friday and, after park officials reviewed the list of exceptions for businesses, snow-blowing began the following Monday, before much of the public had fully grasped the severity of the situation. After the project was ridiculed in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the park shut it down. Ms. Parker said that only then did the park hear from state environmental authorities.

Stone Mountain had never intended to take a cavalier attitude toward the drought, Ms. Parker said, but had not been given any guidance.

“A lot of businesses are having to go out and ask the right questions,” she said, “so they can do the right thing.”

Correction: October 24, 2007

An article on Tuesday about the drought in the Southeast misstated the name of a group that provides employees to the city of Atlanta’s water planning district. It is the Atlanta Regional Commission, not the Atlanta Regional Committee.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: New to Being Dry, the South Struggles to Adapt. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe